After an interminable six days over the Bay of Bengal, land was finally sighted, and Wellman set the pilots loose to scout.
The great armature lowered Udet’s plane out of the Black Cross’s belly. His stomach leapt into his mouth as the plane dropped like a stone toward the green carpet that spread out below him. Fleecy clouds raced past him as the propeller caught, stuttered for a moment, then hissed into full throttle. An invisible cow sat in Udet’s lap as he pulled the Sopwith biplane out of its dive, and then the exhilaration of too-long denied flight was on him. The land was a brilliant emerald patchwork below him; fields and swathes of trees.
He flew for long, pleasant minutes, enjoying the warmth of the air, even two miles up. He rolled and looped, happy to be aloft. He shared the sky with no one; Udet was lord of all he saw.
Below him, a trickle of ants moved along a ribbon of roadway. A busy street had something at both ends, and Udet decided to follow the road as far as he could.
Through the patchy clouds, he could see that he was approaching a city. They couldn’t have been so far off course that this was anything but Kuala Lumpur.
A tricky cloud shifted, revealing a fantastically huge airship, larger even than the Black Cross, squatting over the city like an obscene toad. The canvas was patched with age, overall a filthy yellow color that filled Udet with loathing. When an airship was that old, that mildewed, it was slick and disgusting. What was it still doing in the air? How long had it been here?
Making for the enormous zeppelin, he read the name Carcosa on her nose. Roman letters, but the name meant nothing to him. Could this be their prize?
The hiss and smack of bullets striking his plane made him turn and dive. Two planes dove past him, from out of the sun. Udet twisted his Snapdragon away, keeping an eye on both fighters. Fokkers, from their thick wings and extended flaps, but he could not place the model. He pulled the protesting Snapdragon up into a half-loop and then a roll. The Fokkers spun away in different directions. He followed to the left. Evidently, they didn’t know the Boelcke turn. His enemy twisted and spun, but Udet was on him. His thumb pressed the Winans machine gun trigger just as his prey nosed up.
With a whump, the boiler in the Fokker’s nose ruptured, scattering shrapnel and a cloud of superhot steam. Udet swerved and held his breath. The pilot would have been boiled and flensed to the bone in an instant. Even as Udet flew on, he couldn’t avoid the reek of boiled meat.
He pulled the Sopwith’s nose up, the engine clawing at the air. Somewhere was the second fighter, but after excruciating minutes of searching, he could not find it. Weaving around the patchy clouds, he found nothing. Perhaps it had returned to the Carcosa, or zoomed away with the death of its wingman.
He circled the enormous airship once, taking in what details he could of the broad and elaborate gondola slung below the gas bag itself. All the while, he kept an eye out for more Fokkers. But there, on the side of the gondola, was the baroque lion and unicorn of the House of Hanover coat of arms.
He dove away, excitement squirming in his guts.
“It doesn’t prove the crown jewels are aboard.” Wellman tried to remain cool in the face of Udet’s excited report. The scent of the quarry had the rest of the pilots humming with eagerness.
“An airship with the Hanover crest? We certainly know where we’re going to look next,” Guynemer said.
“All four of you will go out, assuming the Carcosa hasn’t fled. They attacked without warning, and now they know there’s someone else in the area.”
“They seem inexperienced. Despite their Fokkers, they were surprised by Boelcke’s Turn.”
Wellman nodded.
“Did you draw any fire from Carcosa?”
“No.”
“Did you see any gun emplacements?”
Ude thought for a moment. “Again, no.”
“Well that makes everything easier. Bullard, you’ll be flying Udet. Charles fly George It doesn’t look like we’ll have to bring the Black Cross in for support, but we’ll stand ready just in case. You boys have any trouble, zip back here and we’ll work a different deployment. Now, let’s be ready in ten minutes, there’s treasure to be won.”
Udet constantly scanned the skies from the rear of the lumbering two-seater. Bullard concentrated on flying. As they approached Carcosa, they saw no other planes in the air. Surely the loss of only one couldn’t have crippled the airship’s contingent, and it wasn’t as if they were actually able to creep up on the airborne leviathan.
Nungesser approached the airship to the rear, slowing until he was close to stalling. Udet now had to watch both the surrounding sky and keep a nervous eye on his fellow pirate. Guynemer easily hooked his grapnel on the rear-facing balcony. He pulled the line and was abruptly left swinging in space, nothing below him but two miles of air until the forest canopy. He began to pull himself up, hand over hand, wrapping the slender cord around his leg.
Udet didn’t see how it happened, but he glanced at the hanging cord and saw that Georges was no longer there. He leaned over the side of the cockpit, and saw his fellow pirate falling with a slow, vertiginous horror. In a moment, Guynemer’s falling body was out of sight.
Cursing, Udet fired his own grapnel, and hauled himself up the slender rope. Clambering over the balcony’s railing, he had his pistol out in an instant. Without Guynemer, he was alone. Bullard and Nugesser would have to fly back to the Black Cross, and refill the plane’s boiler before returning. He could wait for them, or he could attempt to take the ship by himself.
Above him, the gasbag of the Carcosa loomed, rivulets of green crawling down the aged, parchment-colored canvas. The blades of the propellers stroked the air gently, guiding more than pushing. He didn’t like the quiet, or the fact that no one had come to challenge him. What kind of ghost ship was this? Surely they didn’t think that just being an airship was protection enough.
He moved his way forward, tried the first door he came to. The wood was mahogany, elegant and heavy, the knob verdigrised brass. No one had taken care of the Carcosa for a long time.
With a shove, he opened the door. A man in a slovenly uniform, once a dark blue but now patched and faded, looked up in alarm. Udet extended his pistol.
“English? Deutsche? Francais?”
The man’s flesh was pallid and damp, as if he were a fungi grown in an oozing, lightless cavern. He did not speak, instead covering his head with both arms and fleeing out the other end of the corridor. Sick with the loss of Georges, Udet didn’t have the heart to shoot at the retreating form.
Two doors stood in the middle of the corridor. Udet chose the more elaborately decorated one.
The room was massive, almost a ballroom, had the ceiling been higher. Some thirty yards away, a shrunken and pallid Wilde sat on a mighty throne, clad in yellow silken robes. Dozens of flexible tubes thrust out from the hem. Men and women, the dimness making their skin tone indistinguishable despite their nakedness, lounged on pillows of rotten silk in a scene from a sultan’s seraglio. Hot air and hazy smoke made Udet’s head swim.
They looked up with languid motions, elaborate masks covering their faces. One odalisque’s face covering sprouted a multitude of goat and ram horns in unnatural profusion. Another’s mane of long feathers emphasized her hesitant, trembling movements.
Wilde wore no mask, but a magnificent crown rested on his head. Hundreds, if not thousands, of diamonds flickered in the dim light, forming crosses and thistles, which must have pleased Wilde’s Irish heart.
The man himself–the King of Britain–looked with indolent languor from Udet’s face, to the pistol he carried, and back.
“An assassin? Come to kill the last king?” His voice was deep, resounding.
Udet found he did not hate this man. His mouth quirked into a grim smile.
“I’m sorry, your grace. I am only a thief.”
Wilde swept a withered hand up and touched his chest with sticklike fingers.
“The proper form of address for a king
is ‘your majesty.’”
“You are the only royalty I have ever met, your majesty. Please pardon my lack of social propriety.”
One of the drugged figures fished around under a cushion, and Udet’s pistol was instantly covering her. Oblivious to the threat, she pulled a small instrument out and began to blow a low, mournful tune, never acknowledging Udet at all.
“Cassilda is no threat to you,” Wilde said with a sigh. “You seem typical of the modern, low class of criminal. Not even a proper sense of deference.”
Udet felt his mouth quirk again. With a great hiss of released steam, the great man glided off his throne. He did not appear to have legs; the tubes carried his weight. Udet wondered how far up that mass of tubes went, how much of Wilde was left under the yellow silk robe.
Wilde drifted across the room, skirting piles of listless bodies and heaps of stained cushions. Udet raised his pistol.
“Stop there, Mr. Wilde.”
Up close, Udet could hear the churning of fluids and the hiss of gases that washed through the pipework that kept the King off the ground.
“I only want what we all want: an appreciative audience.” Wilde looked around him, fragile hands brushing at his concealing robe.
“I am here to rob you, Mr. Wilde. Not hear your art.”
“I stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age,” Wilde went on as if he hadn’t heard. “I was a lord of language. But what good is art, or culture, no matter how masterful, without an audience? Creation is not made to echo alone in the abyss. It can only exist with the cooperation of an audience. And therein lies its limitation.”
Wilde’s wrinkled face looked down on Udet, the perfect picture of the man of sorrow.
“There are so few receptive minds, and living in this wretched exile, I have been so very alone. These,” a negligent wave of his hand encompassed the room, “are little more than extensions of myself. I cannot bear to part with them.” He paused
“Politics are pervasive, inescapable. It does not require one’s consent to be ruled. Thus should be art. That which sheds light on human truths should be just as inescapable. Far too many turn their backs on difficult truth or unaccustomed beauty. Ars longa, it is said, but how can we make it last? We live in an era where books are forgotten in a year, and few but the most ardent spirits bother to read anything of true meaning.”
The air was becoming thicker, more difficult to breathe. The damnable, repetitive tune swirled, and Udet shook his head. He should shoot the musician, the one with the horns on her mask. His pistol wavered, unsure, and he blinked to clear his vision. Was something happening? The floor was gone, and he was in darkness, the air rushing past him at a furious rate, a monstrous presence he knew he must not look at looming hatefully above him. Something whispered, like a giant’s rumble a thousand miles away; Have you heard the yellow sign?
“I wanted to find a new art, a perfect art. Art that does not merely affect the observer, but makes them a conduit, infests them, so they cannot but help transmit it to others.”
“The King in Yellow.” Udet heard his own voice say, even as he thought back to the strange behavior of Nungesser’s uncle.
“I searched far and wide for the means to make my words, my thoughts, contagious. I was near to despair when someone, something found me. The spirit of truth that is Unspeakable.”
Udet’s brain was buzzing like a balloon full of bees. He was being crushed into insignificance by hands somehow larger than the airship.
“I did not understand fully when I wrote The King in Yellow.” Wilde’s voice was sinuous, everywhere. Udet, tumbling through nothingness, clapped hands to ears in an attempt to block out the noise. He had a pistol. He could put it in his mouth and make everything stop.
“It was too crude, the participation of others diluting my intent. The results, unsatisfactory. Pain, true pain, perfectly expressed, can wear no mask. Naked expression cannot be hidden behind interpretation. I wanted my rage to infect, to violently tear minds open and expose them to unspeakable truths.” The Last King was silent.
Udet gasped, snapping back to the present. All that surrounded him were the strange skirling notes of the mournful song the woman played. Wilde towered over him, close enough to touch. Udet extended the pistol, finger stiffening on the trigger, but he eased off when he saw the crown in the king’s hands.
“I’m being a poor host, nattering on about myself. This is what you came for, isn’t it?” Wilde extended the glittering crown. “My baubles. Rob me. I have nothing precious to live for, and these nothings lost their luster long ago.”
Still in a daze, Udet extended his left hand, and the Last King put the crown in it. It was cool to the touch. He gazed down on four crosses, and four diamond-encrusted clusters of rose, thistle, and shamrock.
“It must have been very heavy,” Udet mumbled, in awe at the hundreds of diamonds mounted in the crown. Somehow the woe-filled dirge floating in the air described the double band of pearls that encircled the base.
“The years have been heavier,” Wilde looked down at Udet, his face an ocean of despair, but there was something furtive and hungry in the Irish poet’s countenance. In a rush, Udet remembered the Marquess of Queensbury’s frenzy, and the old man screaming that Wilde had his heart. In the close confines of the Last King’s court, his head buzzing, did he truly want to know?
He didn’t.
“Do you still have the Koh-in-Nor?”
“Victoria’s broach? In the treasury. I’m sure you will find everything you are looking for there, the diadems, and scepters. All heavy gold and jewels that no longer sparkle under layers of dust and spider webs.” Wilde’s gaze was worn. “I had feared men like you for so long, and now that you are here, I cannot care. Do as you will, thief.”
Carrying the crown in his left hand, pistol in his right, Udet exited. In the fifteen minutes it took to find the treasure, every crew member shambled out of sight.
The treasure itself was more than he expected, a dozen crates embossed with the House of Hanover seal, sat moldy and decaying, undisturbed for decades. The smell of mold and rot teased his nose. He made quick work of shoving three of the heavy crates to the edge of the observation deck. He attached all three to a parachute and shoved them off, before stepping into the void himself.
Despite his misgivings, his own chute opened, and he drifted down into the jungle canopy.
And yet, he couldn’t get Wilde’s strange words out of his head, the idea of the artist as the spreader of contagion, with infectious words.
In the buzzing, singing jungle, it took less than an hour to find the crates. As he looked up, he saw a third parachute. Hoping against hope, he rushed to where Guynemer had impacted the ground. He knew even as he approached the site, that Georges was dead. Swarms of insects hummed around his body.
It only took a moment for Udet to realize that they were buzzing in the same maddening tune Cassilda had played on board Carcosa. He was infected now, a carrier of the music of the Unspeakable.
Before the Least of These Stars
By Lee Clark Zumpe
1.
An autocarriage lumbered inelegantly through the eddying fog, its vigilant conductor conscious of the stoppage warnings conveyed by a dozen worrisome gauges on the chrome console. The long trek from Asheville to Charleston had pushed the machinery to its practical limits. It chirped and groaned and hooted as it came to a shuddering stop outside a disreputable pub beneath a sooty midnight sky.
The passengers knew only that the journey had been unpleasant and uncomfortable. Most highways had suffered prolonged neglect as the decade-long global war depleted critical resources. Those who could afford it opted to travel by airship when possible – but most civilian airships had been contractually commissioned or forcibly seized as part of the Atlantic Seaboard Defense Initiative enacted by Baron Curzon of Kedleston, Viceroy of America, in 1882.
Caleb Hexam was first to set foot on the plum-colored bricks of Meeting Street.
Tidy, refined and solemn, he consulted his pocket watch before tucking it back under his flapped waistcoat. He wore striped brown trousers, heavyweight high-grade blucher shoes and a brown derby. Stretching his aching legs, he gazed heavenward, forgetting for a moment that along the heavily fortified coastline, the stars remained shrouded in a smothering black haze.
Hexam frowned, despite the fact that the hidden stars were not his own.
Noah Cuttle and Fanny Finching – Hexam’s two companions – joined him in the narrow lane. Countless small storefronts lined the street from east to west, many nestled beneath tall tenement buildings festooned with balconies and ungainly fire escapes. By day, pallid Charleston residents crowded the sidewalks, horse-drawn wagons and autocarriages vied for position in the lanes and merchants bellowed boisterously hawking goods.
At this time of night, few dared traverse the shadowed streets ineffectually lit by the dull glow of aetheric orbs in aging street lamps.
“That should settle up our debt, sir,” Cuttle said, handing a stack of five-pound notes to the conductor. As he paid, he nodded affably, though his expression betrayed a smoldering discontent. “Should you find any teeth on the floor of the carriage,” he added, unable to resist commenting on the jarring ride, “I’d be obliged if you could return them to my apothecary shop in Asheville.”
A few moments later, the three travelers stood on the steps outside the Legger’s Den, a notorious gathering place for blockade-runners and smugglers bound for the Carolina Province. The proprietor employed two variants of the Elder Sign to ward off unwanted visitors: The traditional leafy branch motif had been incorporated into the well-worn wooden marker and the more contemporary enigmatic star-and-eye combination had been engraved into the heavy oaken door.
Regrettably, neither seal promised much protection. The shoddy execution diminished the power of such symbols.
“Permit me a few minutes to survey this uncouth establishment,” Cuttle said, signaling his companions. “I still protest the inclusion of Ms. Finching in this endeavor. A respectable and virtuous woman of her social standing has no business crossing the threshold of such a malignant hostelry.”
Steampunk Cthulhu: Mythos Terror in the Age of Steam Page 12
